


Set Phasers to Stun

by Shadsie



Category: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (2018)
Genre: Alternate take on Season 3 events, Angst, Dark, Darkfic, Death, Drama, Gen, Season 3, Tragedy, accidental murder, canon-divergent
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-10
Updated: 2019-09-10
Packaged: 2020-10-13 21:26:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20589353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shadsie/pseuds/Shadsie
Summary: Catra took a look at the setting on the shock-baton.It was set to full-power, combat-mode.





	Set Phasers to Stun

**Set Phasers to Stun**   
  


* * *

  
  
  
  
Catra fled from the crumbling sanctum. The world was back and she was back in it and she honestly did not know what to make of everything. She’d lost everything – had destroyed everything without ultimately destroying everything.   
  
She was still here.   
  
Hordak almost didn’t make it out of the sanctum. He kept looking back at the failed portal and touching a crystal on the collar of that new set of armor. A huge section of ceiling came crashing down and he finally moved. Catra lost him in the dust as she darted down a corridor.   
  
“Scorpia?” she called, “I… We’ve gotta get out of here!”   
  
Instead, she met with that goat-woman underling she’d brought back from her travels, standing in the hall, Entrapta still slung over her shoulder. There were tools and small devices, nuts and bolts all over the floor behind them as well as two long trains of purple hair, completely uncurled – relaxed. It was a mess.   
  
Catra panicked. She was sure that Hordak was somewhere behind her, cut off by a debris-wall, but he would not be for long.   
  
“Why isn’t she on a transport?”   
  
Scorpia emerged, blinking out into the hall. She held onto a doorframe. “Is it all coming down?” she asked. “Everything’s shaking!”   
  
Catra held her shock-baton out to the satyr she was calling “Kyle.” “Why. Isn’t. She. On. A. Transport?” she asked again.   
  
“Well, boss, we got a problem,” the goat said. “The Beast Island transport’s for prisoners, right? Do ya got any place to deal with corpses?”   
  
Scorpia gasped and held a claw up to her mouth.   
  
“Corpses?” Catra questioned, gripping the baton tight.   
  
“Hey, hey, boss, don’t shoot!” the satyr said with a shift of her body, adjusting her cargo. “You don’t want another one to deal with, right?”   
  
“What are you talking about?”   
  
“Kyle” sighed and rolled Entrapta down onto the floor. “I’m sick of carrying her. How about you, Claws?” She nodded to Scorpia, “You gotta have an incinerator or something around here somewhere. The girl’s dead.”   
  
Scorpia immediately squeaked and dropped to her knees. She gripped Entrapta by the shoulders and shook her. “No! No, Entrapta! Wake up! Come on!”   
  
Catra shivered, her eyes going to thin slits. She nearly dropped her baton. Her tail lashed nervously.   
  
“No, it can’t be! I had the baton on stun! I just… I just knocked her out! Wake her up, Scorpia!”   
  
“She wasn’t breathing,” “Kyle” insisted. “And just dead weight. I’ve been out in the Crimson Waste for years. I know when something’s dead.”   
  
Scorpia was holding Entrapta’s body close and had an ear to her chest, listening for even the faintest heartbeat. She looked up slowly at Catra with a tear-streaked face. “Catra,” she said in a whisper. “What did you do?”   
  
Catra’s blood ran cold. She brought the shock baton up to examine it. Full power. She had it on full power. How could she? She was certain she’d had it set to stun. It was supposed to just knock someone out…  
  
… She knocked Entrapta out as an act of desperation. She had to win. Entrapta was chattering on about some egghead garbage she didn’t understand and she was certain that she was overreacting. It didn’t matter. Adora couldn’t win. It didn’t matter if they broke reality! She had to show Hordak her worth with the working portal, She-Ra’s sword as the key. She was going to win favor as a second in command again. She was going to… She was going to watch Adora’s face the moment the Rebellion’s dreams crumbled. She was going to…   
  
When she’d commanded “Kyle” to take her; she was condemning Entrapta to a death sentence, anyway. To tell the truth, she had just blurted it out. She did not know what to do. Beast Island was technically survivable, a place of exile. Out of sight, out of mind.   
  
Her fingers trembled as she looked at the baton. Full power. Combat-mode. Set to dispense enough juice to cause cardiac arrest and to overload the nervous system at close-range.   
  
“A…are you sure?” Catra asked Scorpia. The latter didn’t answer. She just held Entrapta and sobbed.   
  
Catra turned around as she heard a noise behind them. It was her own voice, arguing with Entrapta’s.   
  
_“You will open the portal!”   
  
“I can’t! I won’t! I need to tell Hordak! He’ll understand!”   
  
“Bzzzt!”_   
  
Catra bit her lip. Imp. There were heavy footfalls. Hordak. He knew. He knew! She’d lied to him again… and she knew that she would not survive it, not as soon as he saw the state of his lab partner. He was coming. By the moons, he was coming! Catra felt like her heart was trying to pound its way straight out of her chest.   
  
“Scorpia! We’ve got to GO! Now!”   
  
Scorpia sniffled, cradling their late friend in her claws. She shook her head sorrowfully. “I can’t come with you,” she said. “I mean… I won’t stop you. There’s a back-hatch that should lead you to the scrap yard – If you run really fast, you can dodge the flame-purges! But… I… I can’t follow you anymore. I’m sorry, Catra.” She closed her eyes and tenderly tipped Entrapta’s mask down over her face, not particularly wanting to look at her paling face and bluing lips. “I… I just can’t, Catra.”   
  
“You!” Catra yelled, grabbing the goat-woman. “You come with me! You and your frog-buddy!”   
  
“No way!” she spat. “I’ve spent enough time being a fugitive! I’m in the Horde now! Besides, I think that big lunk that’s coming this way is gonna skin ya alive! I don’t want to be the next rug! You’re on your own now, Kitty!”   
  
“Kyle” shimmied out of her jacket and started off running.   
  
“Go!” Scorpia shouted.   
  
Catra sped off and didn’t look back. She heard an indistinct “Rarrrragggh!” sound in a deep, masculine voice along with the breaking of debris.   
  
No. It almost sounded like “Catraaaaa – arrrrggh!”   
  
She didn’t care what the screaming was. She made haste down one unbroken hall, then another. She skidded under the closing doorways of the skiff-cleaning tunnels and got a singed mane for her trouble. She panted and caught her breath as she found herself under the light of the night-moons out in the scrap yard.   
  
That’s when she heard a “Zhooom!” and narrowly ducked a laser.   
  
A round shadow loomed on the horizon.   
  
“Great.” Catra hissed. “Entrapta’s pet robot.”   
  
Emily’s optics glowed purple against the dark and she was trundling toward Catra fast! The robot was hunting her and she was pissed! More lasers. Catra would have gotten her head blown off had she not slipped and skidded down an earthen bank.   
  
Catra ducked behind half of a broken skiff that was jutting out of the trash-covered ground. She panted heavily. There was a stitch in her ribs. She peered around cautiously. The robot was searching, scanning. She had to find a way to lose it.   
  
From what she could see, the rest of the Horde was in disarray. The collapsing sanctum had sent soldiers and crews scrambling to the center of the Fright Zone, but that robot was on a relentless pursuit, ignoring them and even the actions of its fellow automatons in favor of a single target.   
  
Catra dodged another laser and found another debris-pile to hide behind. She couldn’t hide forever. Why’d that damn thing have to be so smart? How did it know? Had it seen her? It knew.   
  
She would have never before guessed that any machine would have the capacity for vengeance. Entrapta had described Emily as “affectionate,” but Catra thought that the scientist had been being un-scientific at the time – anthropomorphizing.   
  
She grabbed a stone and threw it off into the night. Emily followed it, firing on it.   
  
“Idiot,” Catra said under her breath as she made for a line of darkness against the pale sky. The Whispering Woods. It was as good a place to lose pursuers as any. In fact, it was the perfect place. The woods tended to shift and to confuse any travelers, hence why they were Bright Moon’s barrier.   
  
She would get lost there, too. But it was her only hope.   
  
The ex-Force Captain kept on the move until daylight. She found herself among twisted trees. She plopped down to rest against one and pressed her ears flat against her skull against the morning songs of the waking birds.   
  
“Shut up already!” she growled.   
  
Her shoulders slumped. She was pretty sure she’d lost all pursuers, including the robot. She was still gripping the shock-baton. It was a good idea to keep it around for self-defense but she couldn’t help but turn it around in her hands, examining it.   
  
Memories came to her unbidden.   
  
The first was when she and Scorpia had captured Entrapta, which involved pressing one of these to her chin after chaining her up in restraints… The Princess was unfazed and immediately treated the baton like a toy. She’d taken a few apart later, going so far as to harvest one of them to put some modified doohickey into Emily.   
  
Catra’s tail lashed. When she’d first met Entrapta, it was at the Princess Prom. She’d approached her because she knew that she was one of Adora’s new friends, but she was keeping apart from everyone else – leaning over a railing. She’d immediately struck Catra as strange – not dressed up, unpretentious. Of course, that’s when all of the tiny food disappeared from the tray that Catra was carrying, right into the hair-goblin’s mouth. Catra quickly found herself agreeing to be a “research assistant,” and was rather amused by the entire interaction – even if she’d initiated it purely to distract and frustrate Adora.   
  
She had to admit that she reveled in taking one of Adora’s friends away from her, making Entrapta her property in that respect. She knew that the Princess Alliance had probably left her behind by mistake, a “left for dead” situation given the dangers of the Fright Zone. It had been rather nice having her around. She improved the tech and Catra took the glory and she kept things from being too quiet.   
  
Then the little bitch just had to usurp her place at Hordak’s side. Entrapta wasn’t a second in command, not even a Force Captain. She was given no military title, but just by being…geeky… she suddenly was the informal chief science officer. All of a sudden, she was closer to Hordak than even Shadow Weaver had ever been. And all of this because she couldn’t stay in one friggin’ spot!   
  
Every time Catra felt like she was getting ahead – every damned time she had any kind of victory, status, recognition or worth within her grasp, it was snatched away.   
  
Catra’s nose scrunched up as she stared at the weapon in her hand. Entrapta had brought it on herself, really. If she had just followed orders, she wouldn’t have needed to be put down.   
  
_“Hiiii, Catra! I saved your life! You’re welcome!”   
_  
Catra winced and grit her teeth at that memory. Entrapta had saved her life, in the end. The Crimson Waste was a death sentence, but Entrapta didn’t seem to know that, entirely. Hordak was not expecting her to return, but she had survived, even thrived there. She couldn’t return to that place. She’d be too easy to find at this point. All of those desert bandits would sell her out in a second. Certainly, Hordak had had other plans for her, before Entrapta’s intercession - probably messy plans to be carried out by one or more of the other Force Captains. Perhaps she would have been the victim of a public execution by asphyxiation.   
  
Catra swallowed bitter. Once again, her life had only been given value by an arbiter because someone else held her in some regard. Shadow Weaver would have torn her soul to pieces to fuel her magic-hunger years ago if she hadn’t been Adora’s “pet,” so la-de-da if she wasn’t exactly thrilled that Entrapta’s vouching for her had spared her from Hordak having her flayed alive between two pillars. In fact, Entrapta had robbed her. Catra had finally told Hordak to his face what she thought of him. She was about to die, so why not? Entrapta just had to take that from her…   
  
“You got what you deserved!” she growled to the forest air.   
  
Scorpia’s frightened expression came to her mind. Yes, she’d threatened Scorpia. Could she have killed Scorpia?   
  
She shut the baton off completely and turned it around in her hands. “I did not mean to,” she said to herself. “It was on the wrong setting! I didn’t know!”   
  
Catra took the baton up by the handle, curled her clenched claws back and hurled it as far as she could into the depths of the woods.   
  
She got up and sprinted before slowing down and staggering. She leaned against a large tree. These woods were getting to her. None of the trees looked the same. She was already lost.   
  
_“Hey, Catra! Wanna see this graph? It’s about all my friends! You’re almost up to Emily’s status!”_   
  
“Shut up! Shut up!” she grumbled against her mind.   
  
Catra wandered the forest for the entire day. She found a small stream to drink from and some fruit that she knew to be edible from her Horde-cadet survival-training. She shivered as dusk fell, less from the cooling air and more from the realization that she had nowhere to go. It seemed she had broken the world, after all – her world. She couldn’t go back to the Fright Zone. Hordak’s tortures for her would no doubt be… unique. Scorpia – always faithful – had given her that woeful look and finally told her “No.” Her entire body still stung from that phantom-world punch Adora had given her.   
  
Wind rushed through the trees. Catra twitched as she saw purple tendrils from a drooping wisteria move with it. The sounds of night-creatures began to fill the air. Suddenly, memories came to her of all of Shadow Weaver’s stories of ghosts.   
  
Her ears perked left and right. Her night-vision kicked in as the day-moon finished setting. Catra had never bought those old stories. They were just some stupid garbage that Shadow Weaver used to frighten all of the Horde-children when they were little. She did remember having some fear over the tale of the Headless Princess because Shadow Weaver claimed she rode a beast on a saddle made of cat-skin. According to the tales, Princesses didn’t die. Horde-folk and the regular-folk of Etheria could die properly, but the Princesses were possessed of too much magic and madness to rest, so they wandered as ghosts or worse, particularly if they were angry. They could hurt and kill the living – and subject objects of their vengeance to worse punishments.   
  
“En…Entrapta?” Catra said through chattering teeth. The night-cold was getting to her now. She’d rushed out without a blanket or, indeed, anything but her light clothing.   
  
“Entrapta!” Catra hissed. “If you’re out there! I… I didn’t mean to kill you, okay?! It was an accident!”   
  
She kept imagining the drooping tendrils of the wisteria wrapping around her, strangling her, pulling her apart, like familiar tendrils of hair – the very trees around her some new vessel for the enraged spirit of a scientist bent upon dissecting her, body and soul.   
  
The night answered her with only the chirps of little insects.   
  
“I…I’m being silly,” Catra said, running a clawed hand through her mane. “There’s no such thing as ghosts. Not even Princess-ghosts. Entrapta is dead… she’s…dead….dead…and I... I killed her.”   
  
She sat curled up, staring wide-eyed into the night.   
  
“She…she was a friend… and I killed her.”   
  
She growled and bit her lip. “Adora! It’s Adora’s fault! If only she hadn’t taunted me about opening the portal!” Another run of her hand through her mane. “No…she...she was trying to warn me. Dammit, Adora!”   
  
She sighed.   
  
“If only you didn’t have that damn sword!”   
  
Thoughts of vengeance consumed her mind – images of racking her claws over She-Ra’s form, getting her to scream and to beg forgiveness for being at fault for the death of one of Catra’s only friends.   
  
The image of Adora in the phantom-world came to mind. “All of this! It’s YOUR fault, Catra!”   
  
And so it was.   
  
It was her fault. All of it.   
  
Adora didn’t pull a switch and break reality. She had.   
  
Catra did not know how Adora had managed to fix it, but she had fixed it.   
  
Yet it hadn’t brought Entrapta back.   
  
Adora hadn’t put a shock-baton to the woman’s back.   
  
She had.   
  
Catra looked up and saw the spire of Bright Moon Palace peeking out above some of the trees.   
  
The Fright Zone’s green-lit air was on the opposite horizon.   
  
In the increasingly darkening woods, a killer sat alone and wept.   
  
  



End file.
